IHCantabria participated in an international study that explores the evolution of the coastline using radar satellite images

Researchers of the Environmental Hydraulics Institute of the University of Cantabria (IHCantabria) participated in an international study using synthetic aperture radar (SAR), from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 1 mission, to observe shoreline changes over different time scales and coastal environments. Its results were recently published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, in a paper entitled: “Assessment of shoreline change from SAR satellite imagery in three tidally controlled coastal environments”.

This paper describes a new method of automatic shoreline detection using SAR technology and a novel approach to automatically quantify its quality, so that it is transferable to the study of coastal morphodynamic evolution anywhere in the world.

This research reveals the potential of SAR technology to identify coastal morphological changes in diverse environments and time scales. The processes observed include long-term changes in coastal dune vegetation, seasonal and multi-year fluctuations in beach sand distribution, and short-term changes produced by extreme events.

These and other results are referred to by the authors of the article, which was written by an international and multidisciplinary team of six researchers, including Paula Gomes Da Silva, Jara Martínez Sánchez and Arnau Garcia Tort, members of the Coastal Engineering and Management Group of IHCantabria.

One of the advantages of using SAR over optical sensors is that it is not affected by lack of sunlight or cloud cover, thus providing a higher frequency of observations. However, the study’s research team acknowledged the challenge and complexity of sometimes interpreting the SAR signal, noting that it provides shorelines located above the highest water mark elevation in a systematic way and can be affected by factors such as shoreline orientation, coastal topography, angle of incidence of the radar signal, beach type or soil moisture.

Therefore, this study not only contributes to the understanding of the capabilities of SAR technology, but also opens the way for future research in relation to the observation of the evolution of the coastline using a remote sensing technology little exploited so far, such as SAR.

This study is part of the Marine Science Program of IHCantabria (PCM), which is part of the Complementary R+D+i Plan in Marine Sciences, ThinkInAzul. This is financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, with funds from the European Union NextGenerationEU (PRTR-C17.I1), and by the Autonomous Community of Cantabria.

The content of the article published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering is available on the following link: https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse12010163